Since television became a commodity in homes, hotels, offices and other buildings, coaxial cable (coax in short) networks have regularly been implemented in such facilities. As a result, a large percentage of such facilities built in developed countries during at least the last 50 years are provided with coaxial networks. Provision of signal access to a building has been accomplished in different ways throughout the years, from the early solution with a local antenna receiver to wired cable TV connection, and later optical fiber networks. Still, there is a need to distribute access within the building, for which the local coaxial network may be used.
Multimedia over Coaxial Alliance (MoCA) is an industry standard alliance developing technology for the connected home. MoCA is a layer-2 transport protocol enabling distribution of content over the existing in-home coaxial cabling. MoCA technology is e.g. used as an in-home backbone to guarantee wireless connectivity.
In a MoCA network system, a dedicated MoCA network management device is connected to the coaxial cable network of a building complex, and to an external data channel, such as a supply data cable or an optical fiber. The network management device makes use of the previously un-used frequency spectrum above the regular TV spectrum in coaxial cables for data transportation. The network management device may be configured to merge an incoming data stream from the external data channel and a TV signal, if present, into the same cable and to send it through the coaxial network. At the other end of the coaxial network, the signals are received by a dedicated MoCA end device.
Originally, MoCA was developed to operate as a fully meshed point-to-point network, where each node is interconnected bi-directionally to every other node in the MoCA network.
Recently, MoCA introduced a new broadband access specification, MoCA Access, currently based on the MoCA 2.5 in-home standard and capable of 2.5 Gbps actual data rates. MoCA Access is point-to-multipoint serving up to 63 nodes (end devices). Thus, in MoCA Access, all nodes are isolated from each other. MoCA Access is thereby particularly suited for providing content and data broadband access to a plurality of independent users over an existing coax infrastructure in multi-dwelling units, blocks of flats, hotels, holiday villages etc, as well as commercial buildings, such as restaurants and offices.
While such a MoCA Access network ensures that data is not unintentionally shared between different users in a building, it also suffers from a lack of flexibility in the resulting data communication since it prevents establishment of a direct connection between two or more end devices. With the proliferation of Internet-connected devices, a user is likely to install network-connected devices in different rooms within an apartment and expect to be able to communicate between the different devices, e.g. to operate a computer in one room to print a document on a printer in another room or to stream content to a media player in another room.